Apple Watch Series 12 & Ultra 4 review

I had the chance to play around with the Pearl White ceramic version after the keynote, and it is a very pure and striking shade of white. It reminds me of freshly fallen snow. I have the Dark Bronze aluminium Series 12 for review, and it’s certainly an uncommon colour. I think its name is apt, and it reminds me of patinated bronze watches.

After years of using Ion-X glass, Apple is switching to Ceramic Shield 2 as the glass on the aluminium models. Having experienced the toughness of Ceramic Shield 2 in last year’s Pro iPhones, this is a good thing. The titanium and ceramic Series 12 watches, as well as the Ultra 4, all have sapphire crystal glass.

All-new Health Sensing System

Perhaps the most obvious physical change in this year’s watches is the new Health Sensing System – Apple’s name for its optical heart rate reader. It’s been thoroughly re-engineered so that it can not only take more accurate readings, but also take them more regularly to enable certain health features. Apple says it’s “the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable”, and both the Series 12 and Ultra 4 get this new sensor. 

If you turn the watches on their backs, you can see that the sensor is considerably more intricate and complex. It’s been designed to increase skin contact and to emit and capture light more efficiently. With this new design, Apple says it can measure your heart rate every 5 seconds, all day long – which is 60 times more frequent than last year’s watches. It can also take your background heart rate every 5 seconds even when you are active. These higher frequency readings mean the Apple Watch can now more accurately detect your activity levels and calorie estimates. And to take advantage of it, there’s a new heart rate complication that shows your live heart rate on your watch face.

Aside from heart rate readings, the improved sensor also allows the watch to sample your heart rate variability (HRV) more frequently. It now samples your HRV every 5 minutes instead of every two hours, allowing the watch to provide a new reading called Recovery HRV, which can give a sense of how you are coping with aspects like stress and fatigue. 

The Vitals app has been improved too to take advantage of the new Recovery HRV readings. Apart from incorporating HRV into its measurements, the app now consists of daytime and overnight vitals. Apple says this can alert wearers if something is off even before it shows up in their overnight vitals. This feature requires the owner to wear it to sleep for about a week to get some baseline readings, so I’m afraid I can’t comment on it now.

These enhanced readings also enable a new app called Readiness. This analyses your recent activity, vitals, and sleep to give you a score (out of 10) on your body’s general state of being. The idea is that it can tell you how prepared you are to tackle the day, whether you should push yourself or take it easy. This requires a baseline reading, so I’m going to have to wear the watch for a couple more days before it can give me a Readiness score.

Faster charging and longer battery life

One of my ongoing gripes about Apple’s watches is that they require pretty frequent charging, and that charging them requires a special puck. Happily, Apple has made some improvements. These watches still require the puck to charge, but they now support faster charging. 

For Series 12, you can get an additional 12 hours of battery life in just 15 minutes. And as for the Ultra 4, the same 15 minutes will get you an additional 18 hours of battery life. This means a charge while you make your coffee or shower in the morning should be sufficient to get you through the day. However, note that this requires the puck that comes in the box – this faster charging will not work with older charging pucks.

The Ultra 4 also gets a slightly larger battery, so it now gets up to 50 hours of battery life (up from 42 hours). It also gets up to 18 hours of full workout tracking with GPS and heart rate (up from 14 hours), and 45 hours in Max Extended Workout tracking mode (up from 35 hours). The Series 12 battery life is unchanged, which means up to 24 hours with “normal use”. Stay tuned as I put these two watches to the test and report with my findings.

Audio Intelligence

Arguably the biggest update to the Series 12 and Ultra 4 is a suite of sound-related features called Audio Intelligence. There are a couple of aspects to this, so let me run them through individually.

Sound Recognition (available now) – This feature notifies you if it detects “important sounds” like alarms, doorbells, or crying babies. So far, I’ve tried seeing if it can identify my iPhone’s alarms, but so far it hasn’t worked. And as for doorbells and crying babies, I haven’t had the chance to test it on these sounds yet. I’m going to need more time for this one.

Faster music recognition (available now) – Music lovers will be happy to know that Shazam now works even faster. If it detects music in the background, it will automatically display the title in the Smart Stack, so it’s there for you the moment you want to scroll through your Smart Stack. In my brief time with the watches, I didn’t find this feature to work reliably. It didn’t automatically detect the song, but when it does and starts identifying the song, that process is a lot quicker.

Live Rewind (coming later this year) – This feature isn’t available now, but it’s coming later this year. What it does is provide a transcription of what was said in the last 15 seconds. According to Apple, you can opt into this feature when you set up your watch, and you can enable or disable it anytime. 

Siri Recap (coming later this year) – This uses Apple Intelligence to create what Apple calls “high-level summaries” of your conversations throughout the day. Essentially, it creates a summary of your conversations with others. What’s important to note is that this isn’t a transcription, speakers aren’t identified, and there’s no accompanying audio recording. Like Live Rewind, Siri Recap is coming later this year.

Live Rewind and Siri Recap are certainly interesting features that have the potential to be helpful, but they also raise questions about privacy. This is a discussion for another day, but my initial feel is that I’m not sure if the controversy and uneasiness around these features is a worthwhile thing for Apple to pursue as a feature for its watches. Already, people are convinced that their phones are listening to them to send them ads, so I’m not sure how these same people will take to a watch that is tacitly admitting to being always tuned in to conversations. Certainly, there’s more to unpack and consider, but I want to learn the specifics of how these features work and experience their utility in the real world before passing judgment on them.

First impressions

While we didn’t get any significant design changes, this year’s watches actually pack pretty significant enhancements under the hood. The new S11 chip and health sensing system are important upgrades and enable a bunch of compelling and interesting new features such as more detailed heart readings, the Readiness score, and the suite of Audio Intelligence features. As I said, I’ll need more time to fully test these features, but even now, I can see how they might be useful to some people. I’ll continue to update this article with my findings, but be sure to stay tuned by bookmarking this page.

Note: You can pre-order the Apple Watch now from Lazada, Shopee, and the Apple Online Store. The watches will be available in retail on 18 September.